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Welcome Back!Our team is very pleased to welcome back to EBXL, Scott Killen, whom as many of you that follow EBXL know, was part of the team for a long time. Scott retired from actively modding about a year ago, although he still continued to write hooks for Forge as well as helping behind the scenes with several mods. He was instrumental in making EBXL one of the most popular biome adding mods for Minecraft. This is in part due to the high standards he has for everything he does, as well as being an all around genuinely nice person.It’s a shame that you can only list one person as the “author” or “creator” of the mod because EBXL is the result of team work and not any one person. We have an outstanding team of people that work together to bring EBXL to you, our players. I feel very lucky to be able to work with such a wonderful group of people.We have many new and exciting things that will be happening in the coming weeks and months. We will be releasing 3.15.2 in the next day or two. It will contain some tweaks to flower generation as well as adding a few new plants and dyes. (A full list of changes will be posted when it is released.) It will also have a special Valentine Day present for everyone!At this time we plan on releasing 3.16 as the last update to 1.64 before moving on to 1.7.

Well, I just got reminded again of the fact that trying to release an update after working for nearly all day, when one is still under the effects of a cold can result in a few derps. It turns out that yesterday’s release was supposed to be 3.15, not 3.14.6. Things got changed in some places and not in others, so mcmod.info was reporting that the mod was 3.14.6 and internally the mod was saying that it was 3.15. Also, we missed a couple other things, such as the day after we finished updating the New Dawn API, it was updated. The missed change was causing crashes, which should be taken care of in this patch. Also, due to the late hour and my not having a written checklist for release procedures at the time, (Annysia is in the process of writing one up so I don’t goof things up again.) I forgot to do testing in dedicated server mode, and look over the forge log for any warnings/error so a small error with trying to load textures on the server got through. I have to give a grateful thanks to our team member joe12o, for getting the fix to that written up after it was reported, while I was sleeping.

Anyways here is ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.1, which should fix those issues. I am still looking forward to trying to get another balancing release in on Monday or some time later this week.

Change Log

Bug Fixes:

Updated New Dawn API

Fixed crash on Server due to code running that should only run on the client.

Well boys and girls, oh, and you ladies and gentlemen in the modded Minecraft community, we are back in business, and finally despite the perfectionists and various troublesome bits of code have a new release for you all to tinker around in.

For those of you who could care less about any news and just want the download link, go have at it. Although you might want to read the change list as there were a couple things that you may want to know if you run into any issues, and a few things have changed. For those of you who are willing to wait a little while, please continue reading.

What is this sorcery?

We have a top secret project that we had hoped to preview/demo in this build, but things haven’t worked out quite as well as we had hoped, so we had to push it back a little longer. No, this secret project is not v4, although it has helped me breakthrough some of the things that had been holding me back. I really can’t say to much more with out giving away to many things. But to sum it up, it is something that as far as we know, has never been done before and when the entire project is complete it might even blow one or two people’s minds.

On the note of v4. after about 6 months, I think I am finally understanding the hooks that Scott added to forge over a year ago, and I finally have figured out how to incorporate them into the v4 world generator. This would allow us to do things like finally control the rate that biomes spawn, so lets say you wanted a world that has very few wastelands you can finally allow that. All in all I have to say that the hooks that Scott wrote are totally awesome, and that I have been considering using a couple of them to write a super small utility mod to “deal” with troublesome players like Annysia, who hate all things that attack you, would like to have on your survival server. The big thing that has held me back is that with some of the new features that are being added to the 1.8 snapshots, it looks like it might be doable in vanilla with command blocks come 1.8, if they add just one more thing to commands. (The only thing thing that is missing for it to work in vanilla as it stands now is the ability to select entities that are in certain distance from a specific player. If this is possible feel free to let me know.)

Anyway, we’ve got a number of things lined up and with more team members, we think we can knock them out. I must say that it has been fun working back and forth on our secret project, with Allaryin and myself pushing code back and forth, and extending each other’s ideas when one of us hits a road block.

On to what is new/changed in this release. We should have better support for Thaumcraft 4 (Finally), and some of our old quarter logs have finally been replaced with more user friendly versions that are a little more inter mod friendly. The old ones are still in but they are only able to be crafted into the new version and will no longer be generated, and only exist so that people don’t suddenly have trees that are missing their trunks. There was a bunch of code cleanup, and a few minor things managed to slip through the cracks that were not discovered till after we had our release candidate and we had already delayed releasing longer than intended so since they didn’t break anything we decided to let them go for the moment. I may do a build on Monday to just fix the few things that I discovered at the last moment.

Configuration file has been moved out of it’s own directory, there is no real reason to have a directory with just one file in it. Also the config file also keeps a version number in it now, so that in the future if we change the defaults for any settings, or add a new setting for some thing that previously did not have a setting, we can set the setting so that if you upgrade it will default to the old behavior and not break any world, and if you want the new behavior you can turn it on.

One example of such a change in action is that we changed up the redwood tree generation. We have finally started working on integrating Forgotten Nature (FN), and the first thing on the list was trying out the Sequoia tree generator. We need to do a little more work on it still as how FN generated it’s trees was a little different than how we generate our so, we have left in the option to allow people to chose the old Redwood generation or the new style. Both styles should be receiving an overhaul in the coming weeks, and will become separate trees, as what most people think of when they complain of the old redwoods not looking correct, is actually the Giant Sequoia, which is a similar but vastly differently structured tree from the North American Redwood. (They are both very closely related according to my field guide for identifying North American Trees.)

Resorted default block id’s, if you update block id’s should not change for existing items, although if you have a number of mods a few of the new items might have conflicting id’s so you may need to resolve them, as we still haven’t gotten any sort of id resolver running at the present. This was done to clean up our creative menu, so unless you are working with us in creative extensively you really should not need to care about this resorting. (Although it might affect things like Inventory Tweaks come to think of it.)

We let Minecraft automatically load our localization files now instead of having our own loader. We discovered a small issue with this with not being able to localize one of the other new features that we added, but it is not all that major.

The new quarter logs now place in what I feel is a logical pattern, and as such you can now easily build things like large bridges supported by multiple quarter logs side by side without needing to use the log turner for every single log that you place.

Sakura Blossom Tree has been renamed to just Sakura Tree.

New Features:

Silk Touch on an axe finally has a use now! As part of an effort to make the quarter logs a little more inter mod friendly, when you chop down quarter log or an elbow log you will get the normal log equivalent, unless you use a Silk Touch.

Elbow and quarter logs can now be crafted/uncrafted, if a log has a quarter log equivalent just place four logs in a 2×2 square and you will get four quarter logs, and three logs can be placed in a sort of an upper case L to get three elbow logs.

Support for New Dawn, another mod that allows for generation of a different style of terrain.

Thaumcraft 4 support for almost all our items, some of our new flowers were last minute changes and got passed over when it came to giving them Thaumcraft 4 aspects. They will have their proper aspects come next update.

We changed up flowers a bit, the Root and Autumn Shrub have been removed. They still exist but will no longer generate or show up in creative. We also added 28 new flowers. Spawning for the flowers has been reworked and we are still doing some tweaking on that.

Helpful tooltips are now available in English for some things. Things like what patterns saplings will grow into trees from, to help you know why that single redwood sapling that you planted won’t grow into a mighty tree. This should help out with future trees as we start to incorporate some of the Forgotten Nature and More Than Just Trees stuff. Other things like the flowers have some flavor text about to them, though we are by no means done with the flowers. Oh and if you ever wondered if the scarecrow had a use, well you can now see it in it’s tooltip. As it stands we need to do more research to enable localization of the tooltips, as it appears that it may not be possible in 1.6 without some of our own localization code.

Bug Fixes:

Well I know there have been a few I just can’t think of them off the top of my head, and it is getting somewhat late.

Howdy, my name is Allaryin and I just tricked the others into giving me write access to the dev blog 😉

First off, by way of personal introduction. I’m a professional software developer and have been around the modding community for about two years now – primarily releasing small patches for other peoples’ mods and hanging out on irc. I had made some small changes to EBXL in the past (mostly config file improvements iirc) before officially joining the team last month. I am also one of the developers on MCUpdater as well as several small mods that were doomed to obsolescence as Vanilla (or other big mods like Thermal Expansion) beat me to feature releases.

We have big plans for EBXL, and I am going to make sure we actually inform people of interesting progress as we start making more regular releases in the very near future. If all goes according to my evil plan, we will be updating to MC1.7 in the next couple of weeks as well as making at least one final MC1.6 release after this last one.

One thing I’ve been playing with is New Dawn support. It is in the early stages, but since New Dawn itself is pretty young too, I don’t feel bad letting people see what we’ve got. The mod is a cool alternative terrain generator, and it gives me really interesting controls over what sort of conditions biomes appear in.

Speaking of this release, it is almost ready – but a few of us have had some real life emergencies come up that are cramping the schedule a bit. We will be releasing 3.15 within the next 24 hours, hopefully sooner than later.

In the worst case, where we still have not vetted all of the patch’s changes, I will make sure we still release the stable updates and make quick mini releases to follow up in the next few days.

In the meantime, enjoy this soothing image while I go pound out the last few bugs with a hammer.

I was hoping to get the rest of the team to write a post, as I think it’s nice to get to know the whole team as well as get their perspective on things. However, our coders, Shecky, Allaryin and Joe12o, are busy coding and our texture guy, Zenth, is busy making textures for all the new things, so you are stuck with me posting again this week. 😛The team has been hard at work so that we can get some new content out to you all. But before we can do that we needed to do quite a bit of clean up to the code as well as some other behind the scenes things, which while not very exciting, will make EBXL much better.That being said, we are hoping to have a little bit of new content in the release planned for this Friday. We are adding new flowers of our own, plus Zenth has worked on getting textures redone for the flowers from Forgotten Nature and More Than Just Trees mods. If you follow our blog or thread you know that many things from those 2 mods are being incorporated into EBXL.We will also be adding in tooltips for some items. Right now, most of you are probably familiar with most of the things that EBXL adds, but with all of the new content we are going to be adding over the next few months, we thought it would help everyone learn about what different items do if we added tooltips.This release will also include Thaumcraft 4 support as well as beta support for the New Dawn mod, and perhaps a few more things if we can get them completed in time.We are hoping to add more content in the next release, which we are wanting to have ready within 2 or 3 weeks from the release this Friday. After that, we will see where Forge is at in regards to a stable release for 1.7 and either add some more content to 1.6.4 or release a version for 1.7.

We have been very busy these last few months and have added 2 more people to our team, Allaryin and Joe12o. They are both great additions to the team and have already had some fantastic ideas. While waiting for Forge to get closer to releasing a stable version so that we can update to 1.7, we are planning a couple of releases to our 1.6.4 version.Some of the things we are hoping to put in these 2 release are:

Tweaking support for the New Dawn mod

Starting to implement things from FN (Forgotten Nature) and MTJT (More Than Just Trees) mods into EbXL

Changing out our redwoods for the ones added by FN

Adding new fir and pine trees to existing biomes

Adding flowers from FN and MTJT

Adding the fruit and nut trees and berry bushes from FN

Adding food recipes utilizing the fruit, nuts and berries

Add a couple of biomes from FN

Helpful tool tips

A completely new item, in it’s beta form, which will only be available in creative mode for right now as it is being tested and we work on the ideas we have to implement it fully into the game.

We are hoping that after these 2 releases, Forge will have a stable version and we can then update to 1.7 and start looking ahead to 1.8.We have A LOT of new things coming up in the next few months. I don’t want to give away to much, but just a few of those things are:

A contest

New biomes

Revamping of existing biomes

Removal of some biomes

An EBXL villager or 2, with their own building and possibly a quest

Villages made out of materials found in the biome where they are located

More trees and plants

Add on mods that will contain such things as fantasy biomes and crops

Terrain generation

Much, much more!

We will also be trying to update the blog on a weekly or bi-weekly basis with information and screenshots of what we are working on. As always, we look forward to hearing ideas and feedback from our players. Please feel free to post them here on the blog or on our thread on the Minecraft forums.

There have been multiple releases of ExtrabiomesXL since our last blog post (sorry for being so quiet). We’re now at version 3.14.5, and bspkrs – author of several notable Minecraft mods – has joined our team and has done some great work these past releases.

Arguably the most prominent change has been support for the incredible ATG mod. Now ExtrabiomesXL biomes can generate in your ATG worlds. 🙂

We’re also currently looking for help in the form of additional coders for ExtrabiomesXL. We’re looking for someone whom can work in a collaborative open minded team environment, has a good knowledge of Java/Minecraft/Minecraft Forge programming and can do basic programming math suitable for things like terrain generation, trees, ect (I probably could have worded that better 😉 ). If you’re interested, please contact Annysia on the Minecraft Forums, with information about your capabilities, availability and past works. Thanks!

We’re still working towards EBXL4. When Minecraft Forge updates for Minecraft 1.7, we’ll be pushing out an update for the current 3.x series to support it.

I’d help out more, but it seems programming (or maybe just Java) isn’t my thing.

We have finally released a backporting to Minecraft 1.5.2, bringing all of the new features that we brought to ExtrabiomesXL for Minecraft 1.6.2 to the more mod complete Minecraft 1.5.2. If you want to use all our new trees, logs and wood with all your other favorite (and almost as important, stable) mods, you are now free to do such.

To sum up the new features, we have 6 new trees, and 6 new types of wood/planks/stairs and slabs to play with, some great new textures from our texture artist for a number of our old trees and plants. And let’s not forget the plethora of bug fixes that we added fixing a large number of things. I would mention that the scarecrow finally has a use for people other than Anderzel, but really having a stationary mob scaring devise is not all that useful.

EBXL 3.1.4 has now been released. This will be the last content update for v3 and we will now begin work on v4. We will continue to do bug fixes, minor tweaks and update to current Minecraft versions until v4 comes out. You can find the download here. 3.1.4 includes:

5 New Trees and Shrubs (Bald Cypress, Cypress, Japanese Maple, Rainbow Eucalyptus and Japanese Maple Shrub)

Bald Cypress in Green Swamp

Cypress Tree and Japanese Maple Tree in a Forested Hill Biome

Rainbow Eucalyptus in a Extreme Jungle

5 New Logs and their Planks, Slabs, Stairs

Bald Cypress Logs (Normal, Quarter, and Elbow)

Cypress Logs

Japanese Maple Logs

Rainbow Eucalyptus Logs (Normal, Quarter, and Elbow)

Autumn Logs

Updated and Textures

Fir Logs, Fir Quarter Logs, Acacia Logs, and Redwood Quarter Logs

Flowers have gotten a much needed texture and naming overhaul.

Hydrangea – New texture

Buttercups – New texture

Purple flowers are now called Lavender and have a new texture.

Calla Lilies are not only spelled correctly but actually resemble the real things.

Autumn woods leaves and saplings now have fresh colors, and more lively textures.

Self Planting Saplings

All ExtrabiomesXL saplings have a chance or replanting themselves if left on the ground for to long.

The replant rates are relative to how many saplings a tree will drop on average so larger trees with more saplings should not overpopulate the forest floor with saplings if you do not pick them up.

The sapling replant rate is configurable via the config file, on a per tree basis. Sapling replant chance can be disabled by setting to 0% chance.

Console Commands for Debugging and Map Making (Blog for more Details)

The scarecrow now scares mobs away in the same fashion as an Iron Golem.

Bug Fixes (There were quite a few that are not listed)

Trees did not tell leaves that they were capable of supporting them, leading to massive leaf de-spawning after a block update near a tree.

Log turner no longer skips rotations on old log types.

Horses didn’t spawn in any of ExtrabiomesXL’s biomes. They now spawn in the Meadow, Mountain Ridge, Savanna, and Shrubland biomes.